You may not know what the drawinglayer is and what it would
bring to borders in Writer. This is a new framework for drawing stuffs
on the screen in OpenOffice.org. It offers a nice and easy API to render
complex shapes. When implementing the new engraved / embossed / inset /
outset border types in OpenOffice.org, I have seen the big difference
between the rendering in Writer or Calc and the rendering for impress
tables. To give you an idea of what happens, here are several
motivations to change the way to render borders in Calc and Writer:

There are 3 different codes to currently render borders: one for
Writer floating objects, one for Writer tables and calc and the last
one for impress tables. Every time I change the core border
structure, I need to tweak those three places... having only one
rendering code for all of them would ease the maintenance of the
borders drawing.

The current code is drawing rectangles... which provides strange
result for the new 3D border types. For Impress tables I have
changed the drawinglayer implementation to clip the polygons
properly. In order to significantly improve the rendering result
in Calc and Writer I need to use this drawinglayer.

I have just completed a first implementation for the Writer objects and
tables: some screenshots will help you to understand the whole story...

Embossed table before the hack

Embossed table with the drawinlayer

Outset table with the drawinglayer

The changes will soon be committed to ooo-build git repository...
but the patch won't be applied by default as it's still work in
progress.

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